Does He Love You?

Surprising new ways to tell

If you believed all the relationship books out there, you’d say that women are experts at expressing love (Hugs before work! Love notes on his pillow! Heart emoticons in every text message!)—but men? Not so much. New research in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin turns on its head the long-held belief that men are terrible about showing you they love you.

A total of 168 married couples, all newlyweds at the study's onset, were tracked for 13 years by researchers. At regular intervals, each partner was asked to report details on their partner's affectionate behaviors, like how often they hugged, among other things.

Turns out that men and women weren’t so different after all. “The idea, and you see this in popular culture all the time, is that women tend to be more affectionate while men show love by doing things, like tasks or favors,” says lead study author Elizabeth Schoenfeld, a graduate student in the department of human development and family sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. “In fact, men were just as affectionate as their partners.”

The rise of the hug-loving husband might be the result of a decades-long cultural shift, Schoenfeld says. “It's possible that generations ago, women were the more affectionate partner,” she says. “But it looks like men have caught up.”

Husbands who participated in the study also showed their love by including their wives in their leisure activities, as well as doing tasks—like cooking or cleaning—as a duo. “There's an important companionship element to this,” Schoenfeld says. “For men, doing something together draws them closer to their partner.”

So if your husband's open to joining you for that Tuesday-night yoga class but is less enthused about fixing the leaky pipe in the kitchen, embrace it. “Be open to the idea that he might express love in different ways than you'd expect—and in different ways than what you see in the movies,” Schoenfeld says. After all, a plumber can fix that pipe—but probably won’t giggle with you over awkward yoga poses.